The blood libel, for example, is a sum total of that innate Jewish perfidy. Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian Defense Minister for the past 20 years, has made an "academic" career of this abomination which he never tires of peddling as a "fact of history," based on his "research" and "experience." Denial of the Holocaust and praise of the European revisionist historians who champion this lie are prevalent in the Arab world, including among intellectuals and academics who ought to know better. Such movies as Schindler's List are prohibited in all Arab countries, as well as by the Palestinian Authority, lest they shake the established belief that denies the tragedy as a Jewish invention.

The Arabs are frightened by any act of the Jews that seems benevolent because that destroys the irrevocably negative image they have of them.

It may well be that these patterns of behavior emanate from misinformation that the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs are constantly fed. It is more serious when these anti-Semitic utterances don a religious cloak, backed up by citations from the Koran, the Hadith, or from latter-day luminaries of Islamic fundamentalism rendering them divine-like, immutable, and eternal. Like Hamas and Hizbullah, Arafat personally often engages in religious rhetoric, calling upon his followers to join the jihad to liberate Jerusalem, or lauding the fallen in attacks against Israel as martyrs. Whether the anti-Jewish statements are taken from Islamic or Christian anti-Semitic sources, once pronounced by a public opinion maker or cleric, they are recited like mantras throughout the Arab and Islamic world. The fact that they fit neatly with the demonic picture of the Jew is proof of their validity.

The Arabs are frightened by any act of the Jews that seems benevolent because that destroys the irrevocably negative image they have of them. For example, when Israel dispatched a team of agricultural experts to Egypt, and they did useful and laudable work, they were accused by the Egyptian press, followed by the rest of the Arab world, of spreading diseases in order to contaminate Egypt's land and ruin its farming. The rationale is clear: how could miserable Israel, populated by those Jews that were born for humiliation, extend any help to the most ancient and experienced farming culture in the world? Something does not add up; therefore it is better to deny that the Israelis are of any use and accuse them of ill will. Since no Egyptian leader dares to come out against those calumnies, they are taken as valid and true.

In May 1983, the Paletinians accused Israel of having "poisoned" schoolgirls in the West Bank, who were in fact fainting in a wave of mass hysteria. The affair was taken up by the rest of the Arabs and Muslims, then by United Nations bodies and the Western press, which wondered "how the Jewish people, who had experienced the gas chambers, now treated the Palestinians in the same way." Cries of "genocide" flew from all quarters, until an international medical inquiry team discovered it was, in fact, a case of mass hysteria. But the Palestinians did not budge; they had adopted the much more "plausible" theory that the Jews had schemed to "sterilize" young Palestinian women in order to affect the demographic balance which was ticking adversely in their disfavor. This calumny was duplicated in 1996 by the Palestinian representative in Geneva, Nabil Rimlawi, who accused the Jews of "Once again," "true to their genocidal designs against the Palestinians," injecting 300 of them with the AIDS virus. Even though the Palestinian delegate could not substantiate his claim, the fact that it was not firmly refuted by anyone present, save the Israeli delegate, was "proof" for the Arabs of its validity.

The moral depravity of the Jews is evinced in their systematic "desecration" of Islamic holy places, in particular the al-Aqsa mosque. Since the 1970s, Israeli men and women soldiers have been accused in the Palestinian and other Arab press of performing drinking and sex orgies within the mosque compound. It is interesting to note that the two taboos in Muslim puritanical culture (alcohol and sex) are given liberty when they are projected onto the enemy. When the al-Aqsa mosque was burned by a mentally ill Australian tourist in 1969, Israel was directly blamed by the Palestinians and the entire Muslim world for having caused the arson. The fact that the arsonist was apprehended and sentenced, that he was Christian, and that it was the Israelis who rushed to extinguish the fire, did nothing to exonerate the Jews from their guilt, because it is in their "nature" to perform acts of profanation. Similarly, when Israel reopened an old Hasmonean tunnel in the Old City of Jerusalem in September 1996, that was reason enough for the Palestinians to cause a conflagration which ended in many

Outpost               - 6 -               August 2001